Poly/Ribbon trails from moving objects?

The Ben

Okay, so you know how in games with ships or flying craft you will see the strip of polys trailing behind it? You also frequently see it with close combat style games when characters swing their weapons. Does anyone have an idea for how you would create this effect in Max (8 or higher)? I'm researching, but any support would be greatly appreciated.

animatr

create a particle emmiter in max, and one of the presets you can load is a trail. Then you can set the shape to plane, and create a texture for it.
Or you could just attach a plane and maybe animate a texture, giving you a motion trail.

The Ben

Are you referring to the PF Source tool or one of the other particle types?

animatr

I believe so. Unfortunately Im at work and we only have maya here, so I cant check on that. But that sounds right.

FatAssasin

Here's a plugin to do what you want, I've used it and it works really good. Unfortunately it's not free...
http://www.bytegeistsoftware.com/prod01_old.htm

Vailias

another way to do it is to make your ribbon.
make a bone/joint for each edge in the strip, and create a dummy/locator for each bone/joint and constrain the joints to the dummys/locators.
constrain the root joint to the sword or whatever the trail is anchored to.
Then set an expression for each locator/dummy to have its position be equal to the position of the next dummy up the chain with a frame offset.

Like
Dummy2.position = dummy1.position @ Currentframe-2
Dummy3.position = dummy2.position @ Currentframe-2
etc,
or whatever the proper syntax is for the script.
That will give you a trail effect. There are more complex ways to do these sort of things, but that should work pretty well.